Editor’s
Note: In 1990 we published an article called, “Pictures and the Blind” (volume
9, number 1). It was a compilation of the presentations given by John M. Kennedy,
Paul Gabias, and Morton A. Heller at a June 9, 1989, symposium sponsored by
the National Federation of the Blind at the National Center for the Blind in
Baltimore. Dr. Kennedy, as you will see from the article below, is still doing
research and promoting his findings about the capacities of the blind to enjoy
and create art.

I was,
by the way, a participant in that early symposium, and, as a consequence, gained
permission for the National Organization of Parents of Blind Children to distribute
“Ideas for Art Lesson Plans,” one of the hand-outs prepared by these three researchers
for the symposium. The material is still relevant, and still available free
of charge. Send your request to:

I also
urge readers to investigate the Art History Through Touch and Sound series
developed by Art Education for the Blind (AEB) and available from the American
Printing House for the Blind (APH) at:

American
Printing House for the Blind

1839 Frankfort
Avenue

P.O. Box
6085

Louisville,
Kentucky 40206-0085

(800) 2230-1839;
<www.aph.org>

Tell your
school that the series is available from APH under the Quota Funds system.

Also, all
the Regional Libraries for the Blind and Physically Handicapped have one of
the volumes from this series to make available to their patrons. Please check
with your regional library and ask about the loan policy. Even if you think
your child or student is too young for this material, please take a look at
the program. It provides excellent examples of visual materials appropriately
adapted to a tactile medium.

These,
and other art education programs, may also be available through a museum near
you. Over 30 museums around the country collaborate with AEB to accommodate
the needs of visually impaired students.

For more
information about these and other art opportunities for blind students, contact:

Nina G. Levent,

Art Education
for the Blind

160 Mercer
Street

New York,
NY 10012

(212) 334-8721;
fax: (212) 334-8714

<arteducation.org>;
<www.arteducation.org>

In
one of Kennedy’s early studies a woman, blind from birth, drew this picture
of a horse.

Giotto was Italian. So
of course was Leonardo da Vinci, Ditto, Titian, and Bernini. Italy seems to
breed artistic genius. It must be something in the olive oil.Little
Gaia is Italian, too. She’s a 13-year-old from Rome who loves to draw, and her
pictures may make her the next big name in changing how you think of art.

After
all, Gaia can just about draw a person sitting on a chair. She can draw a crowded
dresser, too. Even a sketchy wedding scene isn’t entirely beyond her reach.

All very
impressive, even amazing stuff, given that Gaia is pitch blind.

But keep
your shock to yourself if you run into her. “Gaia gets annoyed if anybody thinks
it’s surprising that blind people can draw,” says John Kennedy, a professor
of psychology at the University of Toronto and the world’s leading expert on
pictures by the sightless. He shares Gaia’s frustration at the blinkers that
most sighted people wear. “We’ve always thought of drawings as creatures of
vision, locked within vision, for vision,” he says. But he’s on his way to proving
pictures are so universal that they can be understood through people’s sense
of touch – even by those whose whole world is known through touch and just through
touch.

Pictures
matter so much to human beings of every stripe and color because they communicate
so well, and they communicate so well because they plug into how our minds sort
out the world around us. Some of this sorting out, Kennedy believes, works pretty
much the same whether you’re getting to know the world through sight or touch,
and that’s why the same pictures can speak to both.

Drawing
on Psychology

Kennedy’s
a sprightly 58-year-old, impressively clearheaded, but also jovial and garrulous
in a way that senior scholars rarely are. His special gift for drawing out a
yarn has won him teaching prizes and helps spread word of his research – even
in science, a drop of showmanship can give a boost to raw discovery.

During
a recent lunch, a nearby diner commented on how much fun she’d had eavesdropping
on his spiel; immediately, he pulled her right into it, chatting about him,
about her, about the blind, about art, about his interviewer and the article
that might get written. Twinkling eyes, a trim mustache, a touch of friendly
roundness – you might venture “leprechaun-ish” but for fear of riling the Irish-born
researcher. How suitable that he should choose a topic as cheerily improbable
as pictures for the blind. Why not work on hairbrushes for the bald, or jockstraps
for sportswomen, while he’s at it?

If Kennedy’s
work may sound wrongheaded, it turns out it’s paying off. He recently got news
that, at August’s meeting of the American Psychological Association, he’s to
receive the Arnheim Award, presented each year to a scientist who has made major
advances in the psychology of art. (Rudolph Arnheim is one of the field’s great
pioneers. Now 96 and long retired in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he says he’s still
a fan of Kennedy’s “very important” work, which he’s known since they were Harvard
colleagues in the early 1970s. Full disclosure: I’m a Kennedite as well, having
been invited into a research group of his a few years back as the token art
historian.)

Simply
showing a drawing to someone without sight, or getting someone to make one,
is not such a big deal. Put a sheet of plastic on a yielding surface, then draw
on it with a handy ballpoint, and you’ll make a line that any fingertip can
feel. (Special kits have been invented that get the sheet and stylus and support
just right, but they aren’t strictly necessary.) The surprise isn’t that the
blind can feel a line, or draw one, but that they can recognize the things we
sighted people use a line to show, and that the sighted also recognize the things
drawn by the blind: a legible car, a snowman, a smiling face.

Gaia
has been feeling pictures drawn by her mom, and drawing others in return, since
about the age of three. Last year, when Kennedy came across this proudly preserved
oeuvre, he was impressed with how close it came to something by a sighted child.
It shows a typical progression from simple forms to more complex ones, and depicts
the kind of things you might expect: Gaia’s home, the objects in it, the people
all around her, even the clothes she would like to design for them – though
she’s never seen a stitch of clothing in her life, but knows only what it feels
like.

Once,
Kennedy met up with Gaia in a museum program for the disabled. It wasn’t clear
that was the place for her. “Frankly, Gaia could have joined many programs for
sighted children. And many sighted children would have looked to Gaia and asked,
‘How do you draw that, Gaia?’ and Gaia would have told them.”

Kennedy
has come across such things before. Gaia is no special prodigy. She’s just a
precocious example of how much pictures can mean to the blind.

Kennedy
tells a favorite story about the time he went to test a blind man who’d never
drawn before. They start drawing after dinner, and keep at it for several hours.
Come 9 o’clock, Kennedy suggests coming back to finish the next day. “Look,
this is really interesting. Could you stay a little longer?” asks the sightless
man. Eleven o’clock comes round. Still no stopping him. Finally, around 1 a.m.,
he agrees to call it quits with pictures.

“When
I give them an opportunity to draw, they say, ‘I can’t do this, I’m blind,’”
explains Kennedy. “I feel a bit like I’m saying, ‘Take up thy bed, and walk.’
But I’m saying, ‘Take up thy pen and draw.’ And they say, ‘Okay, I’ll try.’
And then they start, and within seconds they say, ‘I didn’t know that I could
do this.’”

There’s
much more to Kennedy’s research, however, than just its “neato” factor. There
must be something big at stake if all of us, sightless and sighted, are so amazed
that blind people can draw. We tend to think of pictures as pretty superficial
stuff, eye candy that tickles at the surface of our brains. Kennedy is busy
showing that images reach much deeper into the human mind.

“It’s
not just that he’s making available a new resource to blind people,” says Dominic
Lopes, an Oxford-trained scholar who now works on picture theory and aesthetics
at the University of British Columbia. “He’s also making available a new way
of seeing something that is very familiar to sighted people. We’re awash with
pictures in our environment, and this helps us understand them.”

As Kennedy
likes to explain it: “Vision is just a hallway in the brain to get you through
to other stuff, in some mental room at the end of the corridor. And you can
reach it by coming in through another corridor, which is touch…a route for the
blind.” Some of our knowledge of the world is in that mental room – knowledge
about how objects’ edges work, and of their surfaces, about how things recede
from us in space, and how we move among them – and none of that is simply visual.
It’s stuff that every human needs to flourish.

Art in a
New Perspective

A blind
person would be a helpless lump without a sense that there is space out there,
that objects sit in it, and that you can chart a path and life among them. If
drawings can capture that kind of information and present it to the eyes of
the sighted, why not imagine that they can do the same for the fingers of the
blind? Drawings, after all, aren’t a whole lot like the real world we see out
there around us; they’re a kind of shorthand that captures certain crucial bits
of it. Those bits matter to both the blind and the sighted, and so can be understood
by touch as well as vision.

This
overturns some cherished scientific preconceptions. When Kennedy’s research
was just beginning, he had a visit at his Toronto home from James J. Gibson,
a hallowed name in the psychology of vision and his mentor at Cornell. Gibson
was on record insisting that blind people would never, in principle could never,
come to grips with pictures. “Two hours later he left, saying, ‘Of course blind
people can understand pictures. It has to be true.’”

There’s
another old conceit that Kennedy has helped demolish. Some theorists have claimed
that realistic pictures are strictly conventional – that they’re an arbitrary
construct of our culture, like how we shape the letters of our alphabet or the
rules we use to choose a shirt and tie. It’s a notion that has worthy roots:
For years, scholars have tried to level the world’s artistic playing field by
insisting that one nation’s art is no better than another’s. Taken to extremes,
however, this movement has also tended to pooh-pooh the innovations made in
European realism, describing them as random preferences imposed on the less
powerful as though they were hard facts. People brought up on Western-style
art come to imagine that realistic pictures are especially good at rendering
the world, the argument goes, only because we’re trained to read them; we may
think that they have universal meaning, but that makes us like those who imagine
that a dog is naturally better suited to be patted than to be cooked, and so
protest another land’s dog soup. There’s even a long-lived misconception that
tribal peoples can’t read a picture when they see one for the first time – a
myth that refuses to die, despite masses of evidence disproving it.

“We mustn’t
go too far and say that everything in representation is utterly conventional.
Because then we’ve missed the gold mine that there are universals in pictures
that all cultures do have access to, whether or not people have been trained
in them,” Kennedy says. His great contribution is to show that even people who
have never come across a picture in their lives – never having had the sight
to see one with – can understand what one’s about. For Kennedy, drawings by
the blind give evidence for “a universality greater than we ever dared dream.”

British
philosopher Robert Hopkins thinks that may be taking things a bit too fast.
He’s an admirer of Kennedy’s research, and admits that he, too, might have launched
a principled argument against the possibility of pictures by and for the blind
if Kennedy hadn’t proven their existence. But he insists that we need to explore
just what kind of experience blind people have when they come to feel a drawing,
before we decide that it is just like the one that sighted people have. Philosophers
like Hopkins struggle with what it means for a flat picture to “look like” a
real thing in the world, and about the different ways our minds may process
pictures vs. things. If they have to add touch into the equation, that could
throw everything off track. “It’s very easy to think that a way of representing
the world that we make great use of is also available to the blind,” Hopkins
says, “that we see it, and they touch it, but that otherwise they’re much alike.
I’m just asking that we think about this more carefully.” Even Hopkins, though,
feels that the apparent similarities are striking, and may give theorists of
mind like him hard evidence in which to ground their thinking about classic
pictures.

After
all, when Kennedy asks the blind to draw, they come up with some of the same
devices invented by the first human artists painting in their caves, then perfected
by the greats of Western realism.

Kennedy
has shown how blind people can even use and understand the basic principles
of perspective. This is his most important work, according to Hopkins, since
it shows blind people clueing in to one of normal drawing’s most peculiar features
– the way it can take an object like a cube with sides we see as parallel, and
use converging lines to represent them.

One of
Kennedy’s blind subjects, for instance, drew a table “from above,” so that only
a square top was visible, since the legs were hidden underneath – even though
he’d never seen the way a surface blocks our view of what’s below it, but only
felt the way it blocked his touch. But when the blind man chose to draw the
same table, as he said, “from underneath,” he took care to show the top, now
farther away, as a small square, with its four legs angled out from its four
corners, as though looming toward us. In sophisticated art-school terms, those
legs were drawn converging toward a vanishing point.

This
table all alone hardly competes with Leonardo’s “Last Supper.” But it and other
pictures like it show an astonishing grasp of the foundations that great artists
build on. They hint that the appeal of some of what those artists do – and our
willingness to spend ridiculous amounts of time and money just to get the chance
to witness their achievements – may be grounded in our brain’s most basic wiring.

What Cannot
Be Seen

When
the Spanish master Diego Velazquez painted his “Spinners” in the 1650s, it may
have been the first time an artist rendered the movement of a turning wheel
by leaving out its spokes, relying on a single arcing line to indicate how they
whiz by. In the 1970s, a blind woman brand-new to drawing came up with almost
the same device when she decided to try her hand at illustrating a fairy tale.

Which
brings us to some of Kennedy’s most recent work. Now that he’s shown how universally
we humans understand how lines can stand for objects and the space around them,
he’s keen to show how well they also capture what cannot be seen.

One part
of how art works is clearly metaphorical: We use a certain way of picturing
the world to speak about our deeper feelings toward it. You might use jagged
lines to communicate about something that’s hard, for instance, and flowing
ones to show something that’s soft and yielding – soft in fact, or only soft
in how we feel about it. When Kennedy set out to test this very metaphor, he
found that all his subjects, blind or sighted, read jagged lines as “hard” and
flowing ones as “soft.” Even though, as Kennedy points out, the real forms that
our eyes and hands perceive are never that clear-cut: A polished river stone
doesn’t have a single jagged edge, for all its hardness, and a soft maple leaf
is nothing but zigzags.

Like
the rest of us, those born without sight tend to do far more with pictures than
just get a real-world shape across. “The blind want to use pictures to do things,
like reach out to children; show humor; illustrate fairy stories; understand
human relations; understand work; show someone in a picture so that it suggests
caring, carrying or being comforted,” Kennedy says. It looks as if pictures
can play such complex games regardless of the sense that tunes them in – it
seems as though they come ready-made to do so. And once you’ve gone from pictures
that give reliable information to pictures that break rules and prod below the
surface of how things look or feel, you’re coming close to art.

Amazing
as the drawings by the blind may be, it’s not clear that they’ve reached that
level yet. But art, of course, takes time, and this is a community that’s only
beginning to learn what it can do in pictures.

Kennedy is waiting for
the day when Braille newsletters come copiously illustrated, for information’s
sake, but also for the sake of art – “using what has been done before, and taking
a step beyond it,” as he puts it. “Maybe they’re not just showing Mount Rushmore
as it is. Perhaps they’ve added a fifth figure, or put in a joke…Maybe they’ll
be adding Pinocchio noses to the politicians.”